The New YorkerModify

On Sunday, the anti-trafficking organization World Without Exploitation released a P.S.A. featuring eleven of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Each of the women holds a photograph of herself from around the age at which she first encountered the reviled sex offender. (“I was fourteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen” . . . “Seventeen” . . . “Fourteen years old.”) The P.S.A. ends by directing viewers to call their congressional representatives to urge the release of the remaining Epstein files: “It’s time to bring the secrets out of the shadows.”

This plea may appear to have some momentum. Last week, the House Oversight Committee made public more than twenty thousand pages of documents subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate, and, in days to come, the House is expected to vote on a bill to open up a trove of Justice Department files related to Epstein. But, even if the bill passes the House, it may die in the Senate, or by a veto from President Donald Trump, or in the hands of Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General.

Trump, after months of stonewalling on the release of the remaining Epstein papers, appeared to reverse himself over the weekend, posting to Truth Social, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.” He added, “I DON’T CARE!” But we know Trump cares deeply about anything that bears his name, and his name is all over last week’s tranche of documents. House Democrats singled out a 2011 e-mail in which Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” and another message, from 2019, in which Epstein invoked Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, and said that “of course he knew about the girls”—presumably referring to girls such as Epstein’s most prominent accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who was a teen-age locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was first spotted by Epstein’s main accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. But Giuffre, who died in April, always maintained that she had never witnessed inappropriate conduct by Trump.

And, if Giuffre had made such allegations, it’s not clear that the President’s advocates would mind all that much. The conservative talk-show host and MAGA stalwart Megyn Kelly recently said that she knows “somebody very, very close to this case” who felt that Epstein “was not a pedophile.” Rather, Kelly went on, “He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked fifteen-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. . . . I’m just giving you facts.” A fifteen-year-old girl, if it needs to be noted, is not “barely legal”; there is no U.S. state in which the age of consent is lower than sixteen. In any case, Kelly continued, “There’s a difference between a fifteen-year-old and a five-year-old.” Insisting upon this difference may become more urgent, depending on what is in the D.O.J. files and whether they are made public.

The avalanche of e-mails, text messages, and court documents in last week’s House dump offers various revelations, but, at times, it can also induce a strange mental fog—a wintry mix of amnesia and déjà vu. It’s hard to pinpoint, amid the overwhelm, what you knew and when you knew it. Epstein’s many friends and associates may know the feeling.

I didn’t remember, for example, Epstein’s legal team arguing that he could not be accused of coercion or enticement of his many victims because the sexual assaults that occurred at his West Palm Beach home were “spontaneous.” I also did not recall his team asserting that, because two underage victims may have lied about their age when Epstein met them, “their testimony actually confirms his innocence.” It would seem hard to forget such things, but perhaps it was too difficult to believe them in the first place.

I likewise did not remember that, in 2004, Trump won a bidding war against Epstein for a Palm Beach mansion, an incident that may have precipitated a falling out between the old pals; I did not recall that local police began investigating Epstein for sex crimes shortly after the sale, or that, just four years later, Trump sold the property for more than double what he paid for it, to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. This is what is known, I believe, as the art of the deal.

The President occupies a kind of negative space in the (available) Epstein files; the volume of ineffectual sniping in his direction, often volleyed from positions of real power, can be perversely flattering to him. In a 2018 e-mail to the journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein mentions that he just spent three hours “with SB,” apparently meaning the right-wing political operative Steve Bannon, “who believes DJT won’t last to the mid terms.” When Kathryn Ruemmler—the former White House counsel under President Barack Obama who is now general counsel at Goldman Sachs—complained in a 2017 message to Epstein that “Trump is so gross,” Epstein replied that the recently inaugurated President was “worse in real life and upclose.” (That’s the best you can do?) During the 2016 campaign, Epstein sent a characteristically all-lowercase note to Peter Thiel which read, in full, “trump delegate? fun.” Later that year, the onetime Cabinet official and Harvard president Lawrence Summers asked Epstein, “How plausible is idea that trump is real cocaine user?” Just imagine: you somehow find yourself in an e-mail exchange with a person who has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting dozens of minors, and the question on your lips is if Donald Trump ever does a little toot. Summers, who is still a professor at Harvard, also sought dating advice from Epstein, who referred to himself in a 2018 e-mail as Summers’s “wing man.”

As is the case with the Epstein birthday book, these documents run an enervating gamut from the inane to the depraved. Not one of these people can do evil banter; it’s incredible that so much of their lives revolves around networking and socializing. The most amusing aspect of the correspondence, given the figure at its center, is its streak of censoriousness, as when the publicist Peggy Siegal disparaged a socialite in their orbit as “a fat drunk with no money and a bad marriage.”

The darkest thread, meanwhile, is the obsequious reverence for Epstein. In a 2015 exchange, Landon Thomas, Jr., then a financial reporter for the Times, encouraged Epstein to “show the world that you are no longer that guy. You have made changes—and that this is the past.” Two years later, Thomas, ever the supportive friend, e-mailed Epstein to warn that the investigative journalist John Connolly, the co-author of the Epstein exposé “Filthy Rich,” was “digging around again.” In a letter of recommendation, the linguist Noam Chomsky contended that “Jeffrey constantly raises searching questions and puts forth provocative ideas, which have repeatedly led me to rethink crucial issues.” Such assertions sit uneasily beside Epstein’s notes to self (e.g., “beards and long hair , are meant to catch and hold smells. ?” and “does the eye tranmsit information.”), or his orthographically complex lists of names, which read like a blackout-drunk attempt to update “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in time for karaoke on Little St. James: “bill clinton. hamad bun jasem. donalad trup. gov mapp. governoe young. governoe king. . woody allen . morgain fairchild.”

In early 2019, Epstein exchanged a series of subtext-heavy messages with an unknown friend who was a medical student. The D.O.J. had recently announced it was launching a probe of the shockingly lenient plea deal that Epstein’s legal team won in 2007, ending a federal sex-crimes investigation against him. (Epstein was later arrested on sex-trafficking charges and died that August, under bizarre circumstances, in a Manhattan jail cell.) The friend asked twice if Epstein wanted to come over for dinner, which seems to be code for something else; they discussed the friend’s upcoming birthday, which may also have served some cryptic purpose. Epstein wrote, “i have a new idea for you bd present,” and added, “you are receiving 30k in amex gift cards. or I think it much better thet you have your own credit card and start building a good credit history .” In between discussing these mysterious logistical matters, the correspondent appeared to be mindful of the bad press that Epstein had been receiving, and knew just what to say to help him feel better. “People have nothing better to do than make up wild stories,” the friend said. “Especially considering who is leading this country right now.” ♦

On October 24, 2025, the actor and director Christopher Guest took the stage for a discussion with the New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, as part of The New Yorker’s 26th annual Festival, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and more. The Festival, which is the magazine’s signature event, was held in New York City and brought together leading voices in literature, film, comedy, television, politics, and medicine.

Christopher Guest is a director, an actor, and a musician. His films include “The Big Picture,” “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “For Your Consideration,” and “Mascots.” He has also appeared in “This Is Spinal Tap,” “The Long Riders,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” and “Night at the Museum 2.” He has won an Emmy Award for his work with Lily Tomlin and a Grammy Award for the song “A Mighty Wind,” from the film of the same name.

Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. Her subjects for the magazine have included the South African runner Caster Semenya; the artist Lisa Yuskavage; Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act; and the drug ayahuasca. Levy won a National Magazine Award in 2014 for her essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She is also the author of the New York Times best-seller “The Rules Do Not Apply,” and the host and the co-creator of the podcast “The Just Enough Family.”

Just as I come to know a thing it’s gone again.

What’s in my heartwood in my head, brashy, ashy, friable, crumbled colors.

Dormancy. Of matter, of leaf, an orderly degradation.

I have come to measure the dark, not just the frost and not

the lack of light. The uninterrupted dark

of which the winter is a small part. A contraction of the corona, catch

in the windpipe of the old organ, organ of the old windpipe, pipe

of the pileated woodpecker pecking a whole hole in me.

Yellow, orange, brown. The greens break down, the chloroplasts

depart. Each leaf losing its factories from the outside in, its faculties

I seem to mean, from edge to artery, the last gold somewhere

in a vein of no use now. Abscission is a nice way to say

the natural cutting off of things. A wounded limb where leaf scar

gives way to bud scale, safeguard, night nurse, attending orderly

of the tender leaf below. It comes again the assent of spring first

leaf first bloom first fiddle of the fiddle fern. I hated to lose

the light, right when the frost and the xanthophyll make shatter

lightning so plentiful wind shaking the old boughs tambor style

I do not gentle into any any. Any one leaves

and another moves in. New twigs. New nest. Sometimes

a whole new tree in another life in another fall

from another book in another tongue and what

world, this one? This one? This one, maybe. Maybe

the last page torn off so it can’t be read

so it cannot happen (have happened) yet

There is a big demand these days for effigies of me, and I’m happy to report that we now offer two different versions for purchase.

The first is the standard, “classic” effigy of me, suitable for hanging from a tree limb or a scaffold. This effigy can also be dragged behind a horse. It is durable enough to withstand at least ten hangings or five horse-draggings. The classic effigy comes with a free hangman’s noose or lasso.

The second effigy of me is designed for burning at the stake. Of course, this effigy can be used only once, but it has a hardwood skeleton, which burns more slowly than the cloth-and-paper “flesh.”

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new feature: an embedded audio recording of my actual voice, telling the onlookers that I curse them and will see them in Hell.

My creative team is also working on completely new effigies of me. One idea is to stuff the effigy with some sort of bait, so that it will be attacked by sharks. The effigy would be pulled through the water by a fishing line, and the arms would flop as if swimming. We are trying to figure out a way to delay the shark attack until the effigy is just about to reach the safety of shore.

Another idea is to have someone push the effigy of me off a cliff. It tumbles down and down, finally rolling to a stop, and then, for some reason, explodes.

Still another idea is to have kids shoot arrows at the effigy, and somehow have it flinch whenever one hits.

We will continue to research and refine these ideas.

Meanwhile, some proposals for effigies of me have been dropped, such as having my effigy choke on a piece of meat and then fall over dead. Our test group was not excited by this one. The reaction was better if I turned blue before keeling over, but not good enough.

Responses were mixed to having an elephant step on my head, which would then burst open and gush out a delicious yellow pudding. Spoons would be provided.

Me covered with ants went nowhere.

Some customers question the idea of paying money to the very same person they’re hanging or burning. To them I say that we make the very best effigies of me. Each one is stuffed with the finest French rags and rare old newspapers—some even collectible. The eyeglasses, which pop and melt when my effigy is burned, are made to have the same exact prescription as mine.

Ask yourself, Do I really want to show up at an anti-Jack rally with a cheap-looking, homemade effigy? Or with one of the many foreign-made effigies, which fall apart at the first hanging or emit dangerous toxins when burned? Our effigies of me are proudly made right here in America (although the heads are made in China).

Some people want my effigy factory shut down. Fine, but that would mean I’d have to lay off our nearly two hundred workers, including the children. And close down the tent city where most of the workers live.

For now, business is humming. Our busy Christmas season is approaching, and, of course, we sell a lot of effigies of me on my birthday. We are thinking of adding a new service that writes angry letters to me.

One day, inevitably, the demand for effigies of me will decline, and that’s when I will put them on sale. I might even have a clearance sale where “All of Me Must Go!”

Until then, I just hope that when you’re hanging me or burning me or dragging me behind a horse, you stop and think, Maybe he’s a horrible, horrible person, but he sure makes a damn fine effigy of himself.

(Prices of the effigies of me are available upon request.) ♦